Here’s a screenshot from the content I’m working on at the moment. Our protagonist’s occult studies have taken their toll, and the money’s run out. To cover his expenses, he’s been forced to take a job at the lamentable Glover & Glover. Needs must: that Starvation token in the background has just grabbed another Health card, which it’ll consume when the timer completes.

Greedy tokens which grab cards were one of the innovations of the last round of design. I was never really happy with tokens just modifying the number of cards on the desktop. It always looked arbitrary and was easy to miss.

So now – if you’ve got a Starvation problem, or a Recurring Dream that eats your reason, or a Detective who’s arresting your Followers one by one, or a Woods-Portal that requires Moth-lore every day to keep it open – it’ll grab a card off the desktop and keep it unless you can swap in something else that it wants. You can find ways to put your cards beyond its reach, but if you don’t feed these tokens, generally something worse will happen. Of course that might be what you want.

The screenie above looks pretty similar to the mockups I showed last month. But this isn’t a mock-up – it’s running in-engine now. There’s a lot of UI stuff to tidy up, a lot of placeholder art, and I need to write a big pile of the content. But the core functionality is all there now. It’s come a long way since this:

For alpha, I just need to decide how much content I want to put in. It’s possible I’ll make it available before Christmas; it depends completely on how much family time vs work I spend next week.

Sign up here if you want to know when it’s out. Have a splendid holiday season. Dream fiercely.